Definitions for playas

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Playas

Playas was a small unincorporated town in Hidalgo County, the "bootheel" of the southwestern part of the U.S. state of New Mexico.
It is a former company town, named after a nearby former settlement along the Southern Pacific Railroad. It was developed by the Phelps Dodge Corporation in the 1970s for several hundred employees of its then-new Playas Copper Smelter, located ten miles south of the development. Over 250 rental homes, six apartment buildings, a bowling alley, a bar, grill, a rodeo ring, a helicopter pad, a fitness center, a shooting range and a swimming pool were built for the community, which even has its own zip code. At its peak, the town had about 1000 residents.
Declining copper prices led to the smelter's closure in 1999; all of its residents were evicted within a year, though a skeleton crew of about a dozen employees remained in the area. The smelter, about 40 miles north of the border with Mexico, was nicknamed La Estrella del Norte by illegal migrants using its lights as a beacon for crossing into the country. The smelter was destroyed due to uranium and arsenic contamination. The site is now covered in a 6 foot layer of protective soil, fenced off from wildlife & people, guarded by personnel from the Playas training center.